Data centers deliver storage, social networking, gaming, web search and many other services coherently across diverse computing devices anywhere in the world, growing each day both in size and in the sheer diversity of provided services. Several key factors contribute to this growth, including an explosion in the volume of amorphous data now captured and exchanged. One of the fundamental challenges faced is processing and storing this ever-increasing amount of data.
Data centers that are used to store large amounts of data for various purposes are becoming important in many industries, where data centers are focused on improved operation when storing and processing an ever increasing amount of data. Many new applications relate to the processing of large amounts of data, which typically involves searching, merging and sorting. However, the complexity of the problem of storing large amounts of data increases significantly when the processing requires the sorting of different streams, where each stream carries multiple items, within fixed time constraints. Therefore, a circuit that can merge two sorted lists is important and can be fundamental to many data processing systems.
Accordingly, improved circuits and methods for merging streams of data to generate sorted output data are desired.